by Reed, Jaxon
“I didn’t kill him! It was an accident!”
Bang! He shot toward my voice.
I scrambled behind another table.
Bang! Bang!
A bullet ricocheted off something metal and whizzed through a window, glass tinkling.
We changed locations in the room, me on the side with the guns now. I looked at the pistols and ammo mags, estimating distance. On the floor under the table were several instruments he’d knocked off. I grabbed a beaker and threw it at a corner.
It crashed into the wall on his right and he shot at the sound. I jumped for the guns, lightning fast.
I grabbed a pistol and a magazine, shoved it in, cycled the slide, turned around and squeezed the trigger.
Bang!
A red flower blossomed on Schmidt’s forehead. His eyes had the biggest look of surprise. He collapsed in a heap.
I let out a huge sigh of relief.
-+-
So much blood, I couldn’t drink it all. Not all at once, anyway. I stored what leftovers I could in some vials from the lab. Might be a long time before I see a cat or anything, I thought.
I dragged his body over to the main computer console for the station, activated it with his hand, and programmed my own palm print into the system so I wouldn’t need to drag him around to open doors and such.
I wondered how he’d gotten his prints into the AES system to begin with. Said it was his first visit to Redwood. I decided they must have transmitted the prints to the station prior to his arrival. He mentioned signals could travel through the Janus rings. That, or Adams gave it to him after he got to the city. From what I could tell, the computer systems in the AES were hooked into Redwood City.
I dragged Schmidt’s body outside, found a shovel in a tool shed and dug a shallow grave for him. Seemed the right thing to do. His Aggie ring fell off a shriveled finger when I laid the body in the ground. I grabbed it and tossed it back into the grave with him.
I grabbed all the guns and ammo out of the storage closet in the lab and put them in the QC. I counted ten submachine guns and twenty pistols. Lots of mags for both. They shot the same kind of ammo, but used different size magazines.
Now for the problem of tracking. I needed to leave the experiment station, but anywhere I flew could be easily tracked in real time by the guys in Redwood City. No hacking boards to help me here, I had to disable tracking some other way. Physically. I needed a hardware solution, not a software one.
I looked at the stubby antenna on the back of the canopy. That’s how the computers in QC Bay know where the craft is, I thought, and that’s how Redwood City would track it.
I went back to the tool shed and found a heavy wrench. I gave the antenna a few whacks. It didn’t budge. Like everything else designed for the frontier planets, it was practically indestructible. The thought was, it would be decades before new populations could produce advanced items on their own, so equipment sent to colonize a world was made to last.
I gave a final thwack in frustration and sat down to think. If only there was a way to block the signals going to and from that stupid antenna.
Inspiration! I recalled something I read about jamming signals back on Old Earth. I made my way back inside the experiment station and found the kitchen. After opening a few storage panels I found what I was looking for: a roll of tin foil.
I ripped off a long strip, went back outside and wrapped up the antenna tight. I sprayed it down with a fast drying adhesive I’d found in storage, to make certain the patch wouldn’t go flying off at high speed.
Finally I was ready to go. I jumped into the cabin, closed the canopy, booted the system.
The computer’s so helpful. She said, “Navigation malfunction.”
“Ignore.”
The rotors hummed to life and the craft shot up. I turned it, aiming for the strip of dark green trees on the horizon.
Chapter Four
I lost track of time. I flew low and fast, heading for the trees. A few hours passed, and the sun dipped low. The line of trees in front of me grew slowly bigger. They were so big, yet still so far away.
After many hours, and near sunset, I saw the tell-tale signs of crops below me. Must be another agricultural experiment station, I thought. Almost the same moment, the computer sounded a low energy alarm.
“Warning. Emergency power activated. Fifteen minutes of flight time remaining.”
So this is it, I thought. Guess I’m gonna have to walk the rest of the way.
I started looking for a place to land.
I came down in a field between two crops, within sight of an AES building. A few trees grew here, dotting the grassland, but they were normal size, forty or fifty yards high. Young trees. Must be the outskirts of the forest, I decided.
I parked the QC under one of the trees, got out and began covering it up with branches and grass so surveillance drones and satellites would have a hard time seeing it. As the last rays of light shined from the sinking sun, I stretched, and started walking toward the building.
It was twilight when I neared the front door. I didn’t have many plans beyond getting to the building. I was thinking about trying to find a place to sleep, outside if necessary. I didn’t have a light or anything, and hoped the moon would come out soon. A sign nearby read, “New Texas A&M University Agricultural Experiment Station #3.”
“Howdy.”
I jumped and whipped around in fighting position. I swear I must have aged ten years in an instant. The last thing I expected to find out here was another person.
The person in question sat in a lounge chair under a tree several feet from the front door. I’d missed him while walking up in the rapidly diminishing light. He chuckled softly at my obvious surprise.
“Sorry, m’boy. Didn’t mean to startle you. Well, come on over. It’s not often I get visitors.”
He stood up as I came close. Older fellow, in his fifties. A deeply tanned face showed evidence of many hours outside. He stuck out his hand.
“Milton Kalinowski.”
“Marcus Savitch.”
I noted the hefty gold ring on his right hand.
“Not another Aggie.”
He let loose a loud, barking laugh. “Can’t get away from us, can you? We’re all over the Janus String. Hang on, I’ll get you a chair.”
He disappeared for a minute, came back with another chair. We sat down and watched as the night darkened. Native insects and night birds came out. Stars started twinkling.
“Where you from?”
“Redwood City.”
“What you doing out here?”
I paused, wondering how to put it. I decided honesty is the best policy. “I’m sort of running away.”
“I see.”
He paused to digest the comment. Then, “That was you in the quadcopter, I take it.”
“Yes.”
“Aha. Well no doubt someone will be along soon to pick you up.”
“I hope not. I disabled the tracking system.”
His bushy brown eyebrows shot up. “Disabled the tracking system? How?”
I explained the aluminum foil thing, running out of energy, hiding the QC under the brush.
He mulled it over a while, then said, “Yeah, I suppose that would do it. Navigation was disabled too?”
I agreed it was. He nodded.
“Well, let’s have supper.”
And just like that, we were friends.
-+-
Kalinowski lived in the station, but he never entered by hand swipe. He explained the logs may be examined someday, and he didn’t want a trace of him there. We went around to a side door where the palm swiper had been disabled, and he opened it by turning a latch. It was a neat setup. Nobody looking at logs would ever see any activity. And if they figured out somehow that one of the entry systems for a door on the station was disabled, who would care about sending out a maintenance team to repair something nobody used anyway?
Still, there had to be an occasional visitor. I
was kind of a surprise, showing up the way I did. I asked him about it as he fired up the stove in the mess and put on a pot of water to boil.
“Yup. Get one every once in a while. Had one last year, in fact. No, I have friends who warn me when somebody’s coming. There’s never a surprise visit. Well, until you came along there’s never been a surprise. Anybody going outside the city has to request permission, state their reasons and where they’re going. So there’s a record. If somebody’s coming here, that gives us a heads up. My friends tell me, I clean the place, lie low for a while, and come back inside when they’re gone.”
I felt like I died and went to Heaven! Here was a guy living completely off the grid. He had the place to himself, miles from anywhere. Nobody watching him, telling him what to do. I was giddy at the thought.
He threw some tortellini in the pot, then set about making a sauce from scratch. My first supper off the grid was one of the most delicious meals I’ve ever eaten.
Some time later we walked into the back of the station, and he showed me the sleeping quarters. He motioned to a room on the right, which had six bunk beds hanging on the wall. A room on the left was identical.
“I sleep in this room. You can take the one across the hall. Good night.”
That was Kalinowski. A man of few words, and what few he had were right to the point. I suppose living alone for years on end can have that effect on someone.
-+-
The next morning I woke up to the smell of bacon and eggs, toast and coffee. I made my way to the mess and found a full English breakfast waiting for me.
Kalinowski wiped his lips with a napkin, slurped some coffee, and said, “You can do the dishes.”
After I finished eating and started on the dishes, a thought struck me.
“Mr. Kalinowski? Where did you get all this food? Do you always eat this well?”
“Friends keep me well supplied, Mr. Savitch. They bring me what I can’t grow. I give them most of what I grow.”
Those friends of his again. I decided not to push it. I hadn’t even been there a full day yet.
After breakfast we walked outside through the manual doorway, and made our way to a tool shed. The palm lock had been disabled on it, too. Kalinowski went inside, grabbed a couple of garden hoes, gave me one.
“Spent much time on the top of Redwood City?”
I nodded.
“Well, it’s not much different out here. Except, of course, there’s weather, weeds, and pests to worry about. Well I guess y’all got rats, but out here we’ve got the native wildlife to bother us. And, it’s certainly not a controlled climate. The produce tastes better, though. Too many artificial elements in the Redwood City food chain. We’ll eat some native fruit later and you’ll see what I mean.”
We walked a good quarter mile, past robot tractors puttering through different rows of crops. Finally we came to a field filled with row after row of green leafy plants.
“I’ll take this row. You take that one. Take out the weeds.”
We finished close to noon, walked back to the station. Despite the big breakfast, I was starting to get hungry, and looked forward to lunch. As we walked into the mess, I thought about the morning’s work.
“Say, Mr. Kalinowski, what were the plants we were tending to?”
He looked up from the stove with a twinkle in his eyes.
“Tobacco.”
My jaw dropped. Tobacco? I was stunned. I found myself stammering.
“But … but … that’s illegal!”
His barking laugh rang out in the mess. “So is leaving Redwood City without permission.”
“Yeah, but … sir … if we get caught with tobacco, it’s a one way trip to the penal colony on Orange. Or worse.”
He smiled, threw some meat in a skillet and set it on the stove.
“Yup.”
-+-
After lunch, he took me on a tour of an underground warehouse. It sat near the station, and housed tons of tobacco leaf.
“Climate controlled. Can’t be seen from the sky. Plenty of space.”
It was large, and divided into different sections, each filled with tobacco leaves of varying age. Young crops set out to dry, older ones aging in place. The warehouse had a heavy nicotine odor that stuck to our clothes.
I was impressed by the extent of his operation, in spite of my horror of its legal implications.
“Did you dig all this out by yourself?”
He shrugged modestly. “Well, I repurposed some of the robot tractors, temporarily. I use them when I need to. Have to be careful with their logs, though.”
“How long have you been doing this?”
He paused to think for a bit, then said, “Almost eighteen years.”
I gaped in astonishment. Eighteen years he’d been running an illegal tobacco harvest, right under the nose of the State! Well, maybe a thousand miles from Redwood City is not exactly under their noses, but still … this guy was a serious criminal, on a scale I’d never seen before in my brief jaunts through the New Texas black market.
“Many things we like to consume fresh. Vegetables, for instance. Some things need to age, though. Wine. Good whisky. And tobacco.”
“Three things I’ve never tried.”
He smiled. “Let’s look in on the worker bees.”
In another room a robot chopped tobacco leaves while another one rolled cigars in binder leaf.
Again, I gaped in astonishment. “Load bots!”
“Actually more like garden bots. But you’re right, they’re based on the same platform.”
The units’ heads were dark round ovals filled with sensors. Kind of like an astronaut’s helmet, only loaded with circuitry. Currently, their heads bent over the table. The torsos were man-sized, but made out of plain gray metal. They moved by skid-steers, with little tank tracks on the right and left in place of legs. I knew this allowed them to carry heavy loads, and made them ideal for unloading a ship’s cargo. I supposed it also allowed for easy movement on loose dirt out in the fields.
But the notable things about the bots were their arms and hands. They were synthetic flesh, fully articulated like a human’s, down to five fingers on each hand. I knew the arms were stronger than a human’s, and except for the color they looked remarkably similar to real arms and hands. The artificial skin was a light gray, matching their torsos. They moved in a blur of precise motions over the table, dutifully chopping tobacco leaf and rolling it into cigars, placing the finished product in small boxes.
-+-
We spent the afternoon tending to different crops, picking some that were ripe and taking them back to the station. We stored some fresh produce in the mess, and put the rest in transport boxes. Kalinowski had a large assortment of boxes in the rec room filled with food and cigars.
He went over to one, grabbed a large red fruit and tossed it to me.
“Here you go, m’boy. Try a William’s apple. It’s a native fruit named after the Scientist who discovered it.”
I took a tentative bite. “This is delicious. Why haven’t I had it before?”
“Import restricted. Only a select few get it, and the apples sent off planet are all harvested from an orchard at A-E-S Ten.”
I chomped the last bit of it down. It was much bigger than an Old Earth apple. “Too bad. Somebody’d make a fortune. They ought to at least let us have this in the Servant’s Mess. It’d be a lot better than that bland stuff they give us.”
He smiled. “Rank hath its privileges, m’boy. I can guarantee you The Old Man eats these almost every day.”
-+-
I was in for another culinary delight at supper.
“Don’t get to grill for guests too often,” Kalinowski said. Then he spent an hour and a half fussing over an outdoor metal stove filled with coals. Ever so slowly, and with lots of fragrant smoke, he cooked a couple of giant steaks on the contraption.
When he was done he took some baked potatoes out of the oven in the mess and set everything on two
plates at the table. He watched expectantly as I gently cut my steak. Juice came out with each slice. It was so tender, the knife went right through it.
I took the first bite and my eyes grew big as flavor exploded in my mouth.
“Good?”
I nodded emphatically. “Best steak I’ve ever had.”
I quickly cut off another bite.
About halfway through, a thought popped into my mind. I said, “Mr. Kalinowski, is this steak from a cow? What type of cow is this?”
He swallowed the bite he’d been chewing, then said, “Bos primigenius redwoodian.”
I choked and spit out my meat.
He ignored me and continued. “Actually, they should have their own genus since they’re exobiological, but there’s a long tale about the politics behind that, associated with the story of the State kicking most Scientists and everyone else out of Redwood several years back. So, for the sake of simplicity they’re classified in the Bos genus. At least for now. They’re similar to Old Earth’s Bos taurus of course, just much larger. And tastier. I can tell you there was a lot of disagreement over whether they should even be in the same family as Old Earth cows, let alone genus.”
It was the longest train of thought I heard him utter. I figured out later he only really opened up on talking if the subject interested him. But I wasn’t thinking about that at the moment.
“Redwood cow? But that’s … that’s …”
“Illegal?”
“Heck yeah it’s illegal. We could …”
He nodded. “I know. Go to the penal colony on Orange for it. Look, m’boy, you’ve already left Redwood City without permission, stolen a QC, eaten import restricted fruit, aided and abetted an admitted tobacco farmer, and who knows what else you’ve done. Enjoy your steak.”
-+-
After supper he excused himself, saying something about a humidor. He came back with two cigars and motioned for me to follow him outside. Once settled on the lounge chairs, he clipped the ends off the cigars and showed me how to light them.
“They’re made in different sizes, both length and gauge. Some people like the Churchill, named after Winston Churchill. It was his favorite size: seven inches with a forty-seven ring gauge. The ‘standard’ size is the corona: six inches with a forty-two ring gauge. My favorite is this one, the robusto. It’s four and seven-eighths inches. I think the smaller size enhances the flavor, at least with Redwood tobacco.”